More money than sense: Playing the PS4 on the Xbox One

One of the defining features of the Xbox One is that it has an HDMI input socket, allowing you to plug a wide range of media devices into the console. The intended purpose of this HDMI socket is to allow you to watch TV and play games side-by-side on the same screen — but in practice, you can plug just about anything into the Xbox One’s HDMI socket, including the PS4. And so that’s what we did — on a 65-inch 4K television no less.

To play a PS4 on the Xbox One, it’s as simple as plugging the PS4′s HDMI output into the Xbox’s HDMI input and loading up the TV app. As you can see in the video above, we use the Xbox One’s snap feature to side-by-side Killer Instinct and Killzone. It’s then fairly easy to switch between snapped view, full-screen PS4/Killzone, and then back to Xbox/Killer Instinct. (Read: Xbox One review: Better than the PS4 at launch, but gimmicks will only take it so far.)

The actual experience of playing the PS4 on the Xbox One is surprisingly good. In snapped view the frame rate is low — probably because the Xbox doesn’t quite dedicate enough resources to snapped apps to render them at 30+ fps — but when we switched to full-screen, the frame rate was fine. Despite being passed through the Xbox, the PS4 image quality was fine. The passthrough did introduce some additional controller latency on the PS4, but it’s not unplayable by any means.

Playing the PS4 on the Xbox One, while fun, isn’t all that useful. In reality, if you own both consoles, it’s probably just easier to switch between HDMI inputs on your TV — or use your TV’s picture-in-picture mode, if you really want to play both consoles side-by-side. What could we do with a PS4, Xbox One, and 65-inch 4K TV that’s totally crazy? Let us know in the comments.